If you live in an advanced economy, we may be approaching peak leisure. What I mean by this is that we seem to already be living in a time when your basic necessities are taken care of through work so quickly that it leaves us more free time than many previous generations. The entertainment options for that free time have changed drastically as well and the price of that entertainment has become affordable to almost everyone.

It may not seem like this in your day to day so let me explain a bit and also discuss the backlash to all this consumption that I see growing, which may potentially lead to some great things.

It’s Easier To Make Money Than Ever

You may scoff at that first point. You may have a job and you have to show up and your rent doesn’t get paid after working 2 or 3 days. This is the old way of thinking though, you are limiting your thought process this way by tying your life to a 9 to 5 job like it’s 1975. The reality is, for the first time ever, we can break free of the confines of the 9 to 5 through the internet. Your day job may be your anchor, it may be the thing that gets the bills paid now, but just as this blog shows, you can now start a niche product or hobby that can turn into an income stream right after work.

To give you one example, there have been a number of articles that disparage ride hailing services like Uber and Lyft, but these companies solved an age old problem that many in the media have missed. Back in the day, if you wanted to make more money at your job, you usually had to try to work more hours, but those hours weren’t always available. So you had to go through the trouble of committing to another job or be beholden to the available extra hours at your current one.

The ride hailing companies literally brought the market straight to the workers who want to earn and cut out the middle man. Anyone who can drive and has a clean record can drive for Uber tomorrow. I became aware of this when I was last unemployed and went and got an NYC taxi license. Don’t have a car? In NYC they’ve solved that too, apps like Lacus and Dryve.nyc have licensed cars you can drive, even for shorter periods of time. Will driving by itself make you rich? Probably not, but if you want more money, it is an option.

Likewise, this blog is read by people from Australia, China and Germany just to name a few, if I can reach people all over the world with my ideas so can any ol Joe off the street with a few bucks and an internet connection. If you can reach people all over the world, you can also sell to people all over the world.

In addition to work becoming more available, work has become more efficient. I notice traffic is lighter in NYC on Friday because many people are telecommuting. Due to greater efficiencies, less people are needed to produce more work. Take a look at the annual average hours worked from 1950 to 2010:

Source: Federal Reserve

Keep in mind that during this time, the country grew richer. We like to talk about how real pay for blue collar workers has been flat but opportunities to earn income by other means have been increasing.

Leisure is Also Getting Cheaper

Take a step back and think about all the things we used to have to do to be entertained a decade or two ago. TV shows and sports were only available at certain times and you had to have a TV around. You had to have your cassette or CD player and were only limited to what albums you had on you for music. Want to research a topic in your leisure time? You need to go to the library, find the books you need and sit down and read. Literally all those time consuming things to get to entertainment have been eliminated and we can go straight to our phones for millions of entertaining, educational, news or business items that touch on whatever interest you may have. Are we surprised that kids in the youngest generation are glued to their phones? Literally everything is on there.

All this costs is a smart phone, a cell plan and if you want, an internet plan so you can connect it to your smart TV. I have Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO Go subscriptions that give me so many movie and entertainment options I don’t even have time to scratch the surface of the material they offer. All these things for what you can make for a day or two’s work on the new $15 minimum wage. YouTube pretty much offers music for free from any artist you like now.

How We are Choosing to Use This Time

So the internet allows us more free time, and what are we doing with this time? It seems like many people are just filling it with even more entertainment. People are binge watching entire series or dramas that can go for 10 hours. They are playing video games all night until they have to go to work the next day.

Ok those are some more extreme examples but on average people have about 5 hours of leisure time a day. The Bureau of Labor Statistics even tried to measure how the average person spends it a few years back.

Source: BLS

I get it. My thing was news, I was a news junkie. I constantly read all the big stories and updates from The New York Times or The Economist or whatever other news source I deemed reasonably well researched and somewhat balanced. I even read foreign newspapers to see how the rest of the world was viewing current events.

I stopped this recently for a very simple reason. I realized I was spending much of my free time consuming someone else’s work when I thought that maybe I had something to contribute too. I realized I was just consuming everyone else’s work rather than putting out my own and potentially changing the dialogue. If I didn’t like the way things were being portrayed or discussed in the media or on the internet, then I had better get started making what I thought was better. This is my first step in changing my life and the way I approach things, the first movement towards becoming a producer and not just a consumer.

The Big Potential Change Coming

I see a lot of discontent in the younger crowd 35 and below. It’s the “me” generation and when everything seems to be coming to people faster, they are looking for that instant gratification all around their life. Contentment in your life comes from within though, and I can guarantee you that your contentment in life is not going to come from consuming media and entertainment for most of your free time.

From my vantage point now, I can tell you that being a producer is much more rewarding than being a consumer. The Cash Chronicles Instagram page publishes a new story or interesting piece of data I come across everyday and I find that scanning constantly for material for both this blog and the Instagram page which promotes it, challenges me to research more in depth financial topics that I then can carry into meetings and highlight for management at my job. It gives me another market intelligence feather in my cap that is away from all the well worn news sources that most of my colleagues are getting their information from.

If it can be rewarding for me then it can be so for others as well. I think people are hitting their leisure limit. I think this growing discontent in many people will push them to start doing what myself and many others are doing: making their own small contribution to greater knowledge, perspective, service and entertainment for others. In other words, I think more people will begin to tone down the entertainment consumption and engage with the world rather than sit back and let it come to them. This could be through a blog, podcast, YouTube channel or any other way to reach an audience who may have an ear and an interest in what you are trying to do.

Don’t Quit

As I discussed one of my recent posts the late Nipsey Hussle has a great perspective on effort, growth and success. I saw a video the other day that made me think about the other bloggers I used to follow that I noticed had given up and stopped writing. Some of them had great content, some of them were making good money, but they just gave up one day. In that light Nipsey said “my only redeeming quality is that I never gave up, it’s the only thing that distinguishes me from any other rapper who didn’t make it, I never gave up.” If that doesn’t inspire you to turn off the TV, slow down the consumption and start more production to achieve your dreams, then all I have to say to you is: enjoy binge watching Big Bang Theory. 🤷‍♂️

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